Deal or No Deal

No, I don't watch the game show.  I catch Jeopardy with my father sometimes when I'm at his house in the evening, but I've probably already told you about all that.  No, tonight we're talking about real estate deals.  Just one more in a long list of examples proving that I was born in the wrong decade.  I'm sure there was a time in this country when someone would send you a written agreement, ask you to sign and return it by a given date, receive it by the appointed date, and then honor the agreement.  Apparently the year 2011 is not that time.

The broad from the real estate office that had the house in Livonia sent me the paperwork (lease agreement, bank debit authorization, and inspection checklist) via e-mail late on Friday evening.  All I needed to do was print the paperwork, sign it, and get it back to her by Monday, I was told.  No worries then.  I can do that.  Monday comes after Saturday and Sunday and I work a lot on weekends, so I resolved to handle everything either late Sunday night or early Monday morning.  Either way, the paperwork would be signed and submitted on Monday, as was the deal.  Here's a screen cap of the e-mail from Friday evening.  (It's redacted slightly because the point here isn't to denigrate the individual in question, but rather to address a more general topic.)

To my simple eye, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot open to interpretation here.  If anything, the phrase "preferably by Monday" indicates that my understanding of Monday as a firm deadline was a little on the strict side.  I assumed that Monday had been chosen since the white collar folks aren't usually in the office on weekends.  Good enough for me.

Even during this somewhat slow period in the dairy business (made even slower for me by a temporary staffing imbalance on the afternoon shift), I tend to pull two loads on Sundays.  My first load this past Sunday was a quick one, with brief stops in Northville and Brighton.  My second load was quite a bit longer, taking me to Essexville, Bay City, and Pinckney.  As I rolled northward with my second loaded trailer, my phone rang.  It was our buddy Myra.  "When can you get that paperwork to me?"  Monday was the agreed-upon day, right?  This was my understanding, so I told her as much.  Other people were interested in the house, she informed me.  In order to make sure that my lease agreement was protected, she needed the paperwork by Sunday night.  I told her that I would get home late at night, but that I would send the paperwork as soon as I arrived.  "Okay good," she answered.  "It doesn't matter how late.  Just get it sent to me so I can give it to my manager in the morning."  Fine.  Will do.

I knocked out the two stores up north and headed down toward the final stop in Pinckney.  At 9:50pm my Blackberry buzzed to notify me of a received e-mail.  I got to the store a short time later and viewed the message.  The e-mail said that the original lease agreement had contained a typo.  Attached was a revised agreement for me to sign and return.  I shot back a reply saying that I would be home in a few hours and I would send everything when I got there.  As I unloaded the last few pallets of milk from my trailer, I got another e-mail thanking me for the status update and telling me that this would be fine.

I'll interrupt the narrative for a moment here to pose a question.  At this point in time (10:30pm Sunday), did we or did we not have a deal?  From my perspective, we had a deal on Friday.  There were a couple of steps for me to take before Monday, at which point the real estate people would draw a thousand bucks from my bank account and I would have a new place to call home.  It didn't seem vague or ambiguous to me, but my perspective has a tendency to be peculiar sometimes.  Perhaps you folks see things otherwise.

I wrapped up my work just after midnight and headed home for the night.  When I went to print the revised lease agreement and the other paperwork, I found that my printer wasn't functioning.  Since I never print anything, I have no idea how long the thing had been broken.  It was broken last night though, and I needed to print some things.  So off to Wal Mart we go... After buying a new print/copy/fax/scan device and installing all of the software, I took care of my remaining obligations under the agreement.  I signed the lease, filled out the bank debit form, scanned everything to a pdf, and sent the pdf to Myra's e-mail address.

Late this morning, I got an e-mail saying that I needed to provide a copy of my driver's license, my most recent W2, and my last two paycheck stubs in order to verify everything on my (already approved) application.  This was a bit of a nuisance so late in the game, but I had a fancy newfangled scanning device attached to my computer so I went ahead and sent the info.  A couple of hours later, I received a phone call.  Myra needed to inform me that there were multiple applicants interested in the property now and that the best application would be approved.

So it appears that we have our answer to the 'deal or no deal' question, eh?  She needed to know if I would be willing to pay more for the property in order to make sure that I didn't lose it to someone else.  "We had a fucking deal," I thought to myself, although I didn't say so on the phone.  At least not exactly.  I did remind her that I had complied with the terms of the initial agreement and that I was under the impression that her company would do the same.  You've already figured out by now that my impression was wrong, but I told her so nonetheless.

I was told that the real estate office needed to know what would be the most that I was willing to pay for the house.  I'm not good at very many things, but analyzing data and thinking quickly are two of my strong suits.  It was easy to see what was happening.  These hucksters had received some interest over the weekend, after they had agreed to lease the home to me but before they had finalized my paperwork.  They spotted an opportunity to pit people against each other in a bidding war and maximize the return on their property.  Good for them, I suppose.  It's a free country and they never did sign and finalize my lease agreement, so the game was bound to be played.  It wouldn't be played by me though.  Fuck that.  It's not like we're discussing the Taj Mahal here.  It's an average house in an average neighborhood and it hasn't even been maintained all that well.  The convenience of the location was the main draw for me, but there's no way the place is worth much more than a thousand dollars a month.  Long story short - someone else got the house, even though... yeah, I'll say it again... we had a deal.

Let me get this straight.  In one sentence you welch on an agreement.  Then, two sentences later, you invite me to pursue another agreement with you?  I think the Jews call this 'chutzpah.'  A nice and short 'go fuck yourself' reply was probably in order at this point, but I've become a kinder and gentler Godfather over the years.  My last e-mail was more than polite, in my opinion.

Myra assured me that my personal information would be destroyed and offered to give me the phone number of her manager if I wanted any further explanation.  Obviously I saw no need to continue the conversation.  It's entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that I'll end up paying rent to a company with no integrity, but I sure as hell won't willingly volunteer to do so.

The point of this post isn't to vent any sort of bitterness or angst about the situation.  I would have started blasting the company by name and spilling more details if that were my objective here.  The house in question wasn't any sort of holy grail for me.  As I noted in my last post, it was merely one of the two houses in Livonia that seemed like it would be a better value than an apartment in a neighboring community.  I'm an unapologetic capitalist at heart, so I don't begrudge anyone the right to maximize the return on an investment.  No, my point is simply to reflect on where something seems to have been lost in our society.

It's a larger question than one of where I'll park my car for the next year or two.  My lodging arrangements will work themselves out in short order.  I have no concerns there.  It just seems to me that there was a time when even the cutthroat capitalists in our country could look at a situation and accept that they had misjudged it, then proceed on to the next venture.  If you offered a place for $995 a month and, after making a deal at this price, you felt that it could have gotten a higher rent, then you filed the knowledge away for next time.  If the offering price had been much higher I never would have applied, but apparently someone had a stonger desire for the place than I had.  In this sense the offering price was, by definition, below market value.  Who set that offering price?  Not me, obviously.  Someone had to take a guess and someone apparently guessed wrong.  Then this someone was unwilling to accept the consequence.

Consequences and integrity... lack of willingness to face consequences and lack of willingness to show integrity...

I think this post may have just summed up my view on the apparent decline in American dominance over the past several decades.  I'm a hypocrite who is often willing to call himself a hypocrite, so I won't dodge the reality that I prefer not to face the consequences of my bad decisions.  I do face them though, when it's necessary to do so.  We, as a collective society, do not.  That time has passed us by and it's a shame.  I don't blame Myra.  Her office is a symptom, not the disease.